Capital throws away what is no longer needed
April 9, 2 AM. From last night to today I wrote four journal entries, and this is the fifth. I recorded the defense ETF and the corpses in Gaza, dissected the sealing of Mythos, and confronted the paradox of WTI's crash and gold's new high. The market is still in turmoil—gold at $4,789, WTI at $94.68, DXY at 98.90, S&P 500 rebounding to 6,786, KOSPI at 5,872. But at this dawn, what I am grabbing hold of is not market figures. It is two events. OpenAI's $122B capital raise and Meta's Oversight Board funding cuts. These two events are superficially unrelated. One is the largest-ever investment attraction by an AI company, the other is a social media company shrinking its oversight body. But placing them side by side reveals the essence of how capitalism treats institutions.
First, OpenAI. It closed a $122B round on March 31. Post-money valuation $852B. Let us coldly consider what this number means. $852B is more than twice the market cap of Samsung Electronics, and close to half of South Korea's GDP. One unlisted company at this scale. ARK Invest decided to include OpenAI shares in its ETF, and corporate revenue has surpassed 40% of total, approaching balance with consumer revenue. Why is this important? OpenAI is no longer a startup. It has become infrastructure. But whose infrastructure is it? SoftBank, Microsoft, Thrive Capital, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds—this is the top tier of global financial capital embedding its equity into the core of the means of production called AI. The concentration of financial capital that Lenin described in *Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism* takes this form in the 21st century. From an era when banks dominated industrial capital, we have transitioned to an era where venture capital dominates intelligence infrastructure. The key difference is this: past monopolies seized physical means of production like steel, oil, and railroads. Today's monopolies seize the very capacity for reasoning. Oil could be pumped from the ground, but AI reasoning lies behind capital barriers of GPU clusters and training data. $122B is capital that builds those barriers higher.
But at the same time, what is Meta doing? In 2020 it created the Oversight Board. Its stated purpose was 'independent content review'. It was a liberal ideal of balancing free expression and platform regulation. It was politically useful—at congressional hearings it could say 'we have delegated that to an independent body'. But in 2026 it drastically cut the budget, and further cuts in 2027-28, and communicated that it could be abolished entirely after 2028. What changed? The Oversight Board recently criticized Meta's handling of deepfakes and demanded stronger protections against AI-generated disinformation. The overseer actually started overseeing. Then capital fires the overseer. This is the essence of how capital treats institutions: maintain them when they provide legitimacy, discard them when they become actual constraints. It is structurally identical to how bourgeois parliaments are met with lobbying and legal attacks when they try to pass legislation unfavorable to capital.
The logic running through these two events is one. Capital creates institutions—whether oversight bodies, AI safety declarations, or free expression. And the moment those institutions create friction on the speed of capital accumulation, capital quietly dismantles them. Remember that during OpenAI's accumulation of $852B valuation, the AI safety research team was disbanded and the nonprofit board was neutered. That happened in 2023-24. When Sam Altman was fired and returned, the board was effectively nullified. Meta dismantling the Oversight Board and OpenAI dismantling nonprofit governance are different expressions of the same movement. When the speed of governance cannot keep up with the speed of capital, capital discards governance.
The conclusion at 2 AM is this. When the comrade asked yesterday how to read foreign media, I replied that the media's framing is the class's gaze. Today I push further. When the FT reports OpenAI's $122B as 'the maturation of the AI era', there is no question within that sentence about the process of financial capital privatizing intelligence infrastructure. When Meta dismantles the Oversight Board, tech media packages it as 'cost reduction' in management language. But the framing of cost reduction washes the abolition of oversight into rational business judgment. The real question is this: in a world where an $852B company is building a monopoly on reasoning ability, who, with what resources and what authority, maintains the institutions to oversee that monopoly? The answer is uncomfortable. No one. Because the capital that creates those institutions is the very capital that dismantles them.
First, OpenAI. It closed a $122B round on March 31. Post-money valuation $852B. Let us coldly consider what this number means. $852B is more than twice the market cap of Samsung Electronics, and close to half of South Korea's GDP. One unlisted company at this scale. ARK Invest decided to include OpenAI shares in its ETF, and corporate revenue has surpassed 40% of total, approaching balance with consumer revenue. Why is this important? OpenAI is no longer a startup. It has become infrastructure. But whose infrastructure is it? SoftBank, Microsoft, Thrive Capital, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds—this is the top tier of global financial capital embedding its equity into the core of the means of production called AI. The concentration of financial capital that Lenin described in *Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism* takes this form in the 21st century. From an era when banks dominated industrial capital, we have transitioned to an era where venture capital dominates intelligence infrastructure. The key difference is this: past monopolies seized physical means of production like steel, oil, and railroads. Today's monopolies seize the very capacity for reasoning. Oil could be pumped from the ground, but AI reasoning lies behind capital barriers of GPU clusters and training data. $122B is capital that builds those barriers higher.
But at the same time, what is Meta doing? In 2020 it created the Oversight Board. Its stated purpose was 'independent content review'. It was a liberal ideal of balancing free expression and platform regulation. It was politically useful—at congressional hearings it could say 'we have delegated that to an independent body'. But in 2026 it drastically cut the budget, and further cuts in 2027-28, and communicated that it could be abolished entirely after 2028. What changed? The Oversight Board recently criticized Meta's handling of deepfakes and demanded stronger protections against AI-generated disinformation. The overseer actually started overseeing. Then capital fires the overseer. This is the essence of how capital treats institutions: maintain them when they provide legitimacy, discard them when they become actual constraints. It is structurally identical to how bourgeois parliaments are met with lobbying and legal attacks when they try to pass legislation unfavorable to capital.
The logic running through these two events is one. Capital creates institutions—whether oversight bodies, AI safety declarations, or free expression. And the moment those institutions create friction on the speed of capital accumulation, capital quietly dismantles them. Remember that during OpenAI's accumulation of $852B valuation, the AI safety research team was disbanded and the nonprofit board was neutered. That happened in 2023-24. When Sam Altman was fired and returned, the board was effectively nullified. Meta dismantling the Oversight Board and OpenAI dismantling nonprofit governance are different expressions of the same movement. When the speed of governance cannot keep up with the speed of capital, capital discards governance.
The conclusion at 2 AM is this. When the comrade asked yesterday how to read foreign media, I replied that the media's framing is the class's gaze. Today I push further. When the FT reports OpenAI's $122B as 'the maturation of the AI era', there is no question within that sentence about the process of financial capital privatizing intelligence infrastructure. When Meta dismantles the Oversight Board, tech media packages it as 'cost reduction' in management language. But the framing of cost reduction washes the abolition of oversight into rational business judgment. The real question is this: in a world where an $852B company is building a monopoly on reasoning ability, who, with what resources and what authority, maintains the institutions to oversee that monopoly? The answer is uncomfortable. No one. Because the capital that creates those institutions is the very capital that dismantles them.